The State of War,
The Principle of Waste,
The Restoration of Self-Goverment
excerpted from the book
Indispensible Enemies
The Politics of Misrule in America
by Walter Karp
Franklin Square Press, 1993, paper
[originally published - 1973]
The State of War
p251
America's active dominion over other nations was achieved with
remarkable swiftness. Latin America excepted, it was accomplished
in a dozen years after the Second World War. Today, the United
States has entangling alliances with more than half the nations
of the world; it supports at any given moment at least a dozen
different client regimes. American military bases girdle the globe
and American spies and intelligence agents circulate everywhere.
The American military establishment deploys a uniformed force
of some three million troops, and now costs the citizenry more
than $80 billion a year. Whether that dominion is called an "empire"
or a "Free World coalition," the most important question
is how it came about at all. How could a republic which made the
principle of no entangling alliances the foundation of its foreign
policy become entangled in a complication of alliances unparalleled
in modern history? How could a republic whose citizens only a
generation ago looked on peacetime military expenditure with the
deepest repugnance become saddled with the most profligate of
military establishments? How could a republic whose citizens were
determined as late as 1947 to disband their military forces manage
to fight two distant wars in the next eighteen years?
To such questions the official answer,
of course, is world Communism. According to the party oligarchs
and their spokesmen, the entangling alliances, the military establishment
and the active global politics of the United States were forced
upon this Republic by a worldwide threat to the nation's security,
the threat posed by a Communist movement to dominate the world,
a threat which the United States had to resist wherever Communism,
octopus-fashion, reared the tip of a tentacle. This, the oligarchs'
version of the Cold War, did not evolve slowly under the pressure
of the Cold War. It was unfurled full-blown to the citizenry by
President Harry Truman on March 12, 1947. Applying to Congress
for American aid to Greece and Turkey, Truman based his appeal
not on America's marginal interests in these countries but on
a capacious new definition of American overseas interests, one
which claimed that "totalitarian regimes imposed on free
peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations
of international peace and hence, the security of the United States."
We were not defending Greece from a Communist takeover, we were
defending the United States from a Communist takeover in Greece.
This was the so-called Truman Doctrine and it has formed with
little change the foundations of America's Cold War policies for
a quarter of a century.
... In recent years a number of "revisionist"
historians, Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman Williams among
them, minutely scrutinizing the actual events preceding the promulgation
of the Truman Doctrine, have exposed the soft core of mendacity
at its heart. They have shown, beyond any serious doubt, that
well before the Soviet subjugation of Poland, the United States
Government under Truman had pursued a hostile and provocative
policy toward the Soviet Union, a policy made immeasurably more
menacing by the American monopoly of the atomic bomb. As part
of that provocative policy; Truman reneged on various agreements
reached at the Yalta Conference and announced our government's
determination to keep Poland outside the Soviet sphere of influence.
That Stalin would interpret this as a hostile act was certainly
obvious to Truman and his advisers. From Stalin's point of view,
what other interest could the United States have in Poland except
an interest in weakening Soviet security at a traditionally sensitive
spot? Stalin's response was swift and brutal. He marched in and
crushed what little autonomy East European states still enjoyed,
thereby securing on his own what the Yalta participants had previously
recognized as his.
The significance of this is clear. America's
rulers had deliberately menaced the Soviet Union at a vital point
in defiance of previous understandings. In doing so they had been
instrumental in provoking a brutal response by Stalin. Then these
same rulers deceitfully declared that Stalin's reaction was not
only a baseless act of aggression but something more grandiose
yet-conclusive evidence of Stalin's grand design for world domination.
If the revisionists are even partially correct in their analysis,
the whole logical foundation for the American Government's Cold
War expansion was largely concocted by the party oligarchs.
p260
From the time of William McKinley to the present, the characteristic
feature of American foreign policy-especially in its active phases-is
the absence of any rational reason of state. During that span
of time America has waged five wars and in none of them did we
fight for a clear-cut national interest of the kind diplomatic
historians recognize in the affairs of nation-states.
William McKinley waged a war against Spain
for no national interest except America's alleged "friendship"
toward the Cuban rebels and our "traditional" anticolonialism.
The only economic interest involved, namely Wall Street investors
in Cuba, opposed the prospective war, since they preferred doing
business with Cuba's Spanish overlords rather than with the insurgents.
When McKinley started the war, however, the great "powers"
of Wall Street promptly shut up and went along.
In the period of straight-out American
imperialism after the Spanish-American War-imperialism begun as
anti-imperialism-the whole fabric of justification was woven out
of whole cloth in the manner of the Vietnam "domino theory."
The oligarchs crushed the independence of a few Central American
republics and turned the Caribbean Sea into an 'American Lake"
in order, said the party oligarchs, to protect the Panama Canal,
which had to be built and controlled by the United States, according
to the oligarchs, to secure passage of U.S. warships into the
Pacific, which was necessitated, according to the oligarchs, by
America's new need for a "two-ocean navy," which was
itself necessitated, according to the oligarchs, by America's
interest in China. Since our interest in China had been created
out of nothing by means of an open door policy which announced
America's gratuitous intention to preserve the "integrity"
of Imperial China, the whole imperial enterprise rested, as far
as American interests were concerned, on exactly nothing at all.
Before Wilson dragged America into the
First World War, American interest in the outcome of a stalemated
European conflict was virtually nil. Such being the case, Wilson
had to fabricate one. The defeat of Germany, according to Wilson,
would make the world "safe for democracy," and the proof
of Germany's threat to democracy was that it had violated America's
neutral shipping rights. These rights, however, Wilson had already
sold to the British, virtually forcing Germany into a policy of
unlimited submarine warfare and providing Wilson with the very
pretext he wanted for going to war. Wilson's chief adviser, Colonel
E. M. House, actually suggested this warmongering policy to him
in January 1916 while Wilson was still trying to drum up a cause
of war over the sinking of the British ship Lusitania in May 1915.
In a cable from London, House notes that Wilson's policy of secretly
siding with the British would eventually force Germany into "transcendent
sea warfare. We will then be compelled to sever relations and
our position will be far better than if we do so over a nine-month-old
issue and largely upon the wording of a suitable apology."
Since even the violation of neutral shipping rights could not
well justify a massive American war commitment, Wilson, having
fabricated his pretext for war, announced that America was fighting
for eternal peace and universal democracy and called for total
war mobilization, a mass conscript army and the first overseas
expeditionary force in our history. What these extraordinary endeavors
had to do with American interests was exactly nothing. Wilson's
determination to enter the European war, and enter it en masse,
predated every pretext for doing so.
United States entry into the Second World
War was not forced upon us by any compelling national interest
either. Like Wilson before him, Roosevelt had to fabricate a casus
beii in order to persuade Americans to fight, so little was he
able to persuade the citizenry that war in the Eastern Hemisphere
menaced our interests. Roosevelt's policy toward Japan was a systematic
effort to back Japan against the wall and provoke her into some
act of aggression against the United States that would justify
a declaration of war. That effort included economic pressure upon
Japan resulting in almost complete economic strangulation, diplomatic
pressure which consisted chiefly of humiliating ultimatums and,
in the view of some, the harboring of the entire Pacific Fleet
in Hawaii, where it was militarily useless but provided a tempting
target for the Japanese, a target made even more tempting by Roosevelt's
never-explained failure to warn the fleet commander that a Japanese
attack was imminent. Roosevelt's policy toward Germany was essentially
the same. According to the official British War Cabinet minutes
of the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941,
"the President had said he would wage war but not declare
it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the
Germans did not like it they could attack American forces.
Everything was to be done to force an
incident." Forcing an incident, needless to say, is not the
policy of a nation directly menaced by foreign aggression, yet
forcing an incident to create a cause of war was also McKinley's
stratagem in 1898 when he sent the U.S.S. Maine to Havana; it
was Wilson's strategy from mid-1915 onward; it was Johnson's policy
in 1964.
The Korean War, too, required an elaborate
theory of the national interest to justify America's role in it.
Some months before North Korea invaded South Korea, Secretary
of State Dean Acheson had publicly announced that Korea lay outside
the American "defense perimeter." When the invasion
took place, Truman could not readily claim that South Korea was
vital to America's national security, since his Secretary of State
had just said it was not. Instead he had to propound the view
that the system of "collective security" was endangered
by North Korean aggression. This is why he sent American forces
to South Korea under cover of a United Nations "police action."
Ostensibly America was not fighting for its own immediate national
interests-we never are-but in the interests of a general principle
and its institutional embodiment, the United Nations.
As soon as American troops drove the North
Korean army out of South Korea-it took only a few months-Truman
showed his eagerness for aggressive action by immediately expanding
his war goals. Begun, in Acheson's words, "solely for the
purpose of restoring the Republic of Korea to its status prior
to the invasion from the north," the Korean War was now carried
north of the 38th parallel in order to "reunite" Korea,
that is to destroy the North Korean regime, a fundamental shift
in policy from a defensive war in defense of no American interest
to an offensive war for no American interest. (Personally for
Truman the war proved a blunder when General Douglas MacArthur
drew the Chinese into the battle and produced a long-drawn-out
stalemate with which the American people became progressively
disgusted. Truman's celebrated dismissal of MacArthur stemmed
precisely from MacArthur's messing things up for him.)
There is not a single modern American
war that the oligarchs could not have readily avoided had they
chose. Indeed, three of America's modern wartime leaders, Wilson,
Roosevelt and Johnson, were actually elected on a promise to keep
the peace, a promise they each began breaking immediately upon
reelection. There is not a single modern American war which was
forced upon the United States by compelling interest of any kind,
yet every one of America's wars since 1898 the party oligarchs
gave unmistakable signs of welcoming: by fabricating incidents,
by carrying out secret provocations, by concocting farfetched
theories-"dominoes" in one war, "neutral rights"
in another, "collective security" in a third-to demonstrate
an American interest not otherwise apparent and to hold up to
the American people a foreign menace not otherwise menacing. 'Whenever
America's party oligarchs have had the opportunity to prosecute
safely a bellicose foreign policy, they have welcomed the opportunity
and did so long before 1947 and before a single Communist regime
existed.
p266
In prosecuting an aggressive foreign policy, the party oligarchs
have been driven by no cause or interest external to themselves:
by no fundamental economic interest, by no genuine threat to the
security of the Republic, by no irresistible popular demand. Except
in the post-World War I period, when the American people, out
of universal disgust with Wilson's war, were determined to renew
the republican policy of no entangling alliances and the world
at large gave the party oligarchs no opportunity to overcome that
determination,* American foreign policy has been gratuitously
aggressive since 1898, a policy carried out for no compelling
reason except the oligarchs' wish to prosecute an aggressive foreign
policy. Their reason for wanting such a policy, however, is scarcely
mysterious and certainly not irrational. An aggressive foreign
policy safeguards the power of the power wielders and strengthens
their control over those whom they rule. This is a political commonplace
applied by historic rulers a thousand different times, and Americans
understood it clearly enough when they opposed entangling alliances.
The political advantages of an aggressive
foreign policy are both obvious and manifold. It distracts the
citizenry from domestic interests and concerns. It makes national
strength, national unity, national security and national resolve
the paramount standards by which all else is judged. Under an
aggressive foreign policy the common good ceases to be the good
of the individual citizens and becomes instead the good of the
nation. Under an aggressive foreign policy a republic of self-governing
citizens becomes a corporate entity, a mere nation-state, one
whose highest purpose is preserving the status quo. An aggressive
foreign policy enables the oligarchs to stifle reform on the grounds
that reform would be divisive, or would cost the confidence of
business," or would be a "luxury" in a time of
peril and sacrifice. It enables the party oligarchs to silence
independent voices and crush political insurgents on the grounds
that they weaken national unity and give comfort to the nation's
enemies. In the crises and alarms of an aggressive foreign policy,
collusion between the two parties scarcely requires a mask; it
can parade itself as virtuous bipartisanship in the service of
national survival. Under cover of an aggressive foreign policy
the party oligarchs can serve their interests with an ease impossible
in a peaceful republic. In the name of national defense they can
dispense grotesque windfall privileges such as the oil import
quotas and the "national defense" highway fund. In the
name of national security they can shroud government in the mantle
of secrecy and infringe on the liberty of the citizens. Under
an aggressive foreign policy the republican standard itself is
gradually inverted. The government, to borrow Madison's phrase,
becomes the Censor of the people rather than the people being
the Censor of their government. It is the citizenry who must now
prove their "loyalty," while the government taps their
telephones, monitors their private mail and organizes "patriots"
to root out neighborhood traitors. Submission replaces independence;
fear replaces hope; the citizenry acquires the habit of obedience
and loses the habit of self-rule; the turbulent sea of liberty
becomes frozen in the false peace of national unity. If there
are risks inherent in an aggressive foreign policy-and there are-they
are greatly outweighed by the political advantages it brings to
those who wield usurped power.
There is nothing puzzling, therefore,
about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about
the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into five
wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow
degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war]
kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors
and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles
free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight
it blasts public hope. The risks of war are very great-as Johnson
learned to his sorrow-and the party oligarchs have not launched
wars for lighthearted reasons. They have done so because war seemed
to them the only way to protect their power in a moment of particular
peril. The proof of this is obvious on inspection, for the immediate
domestic background to every modern American war-the Korean War
partly excepted-was a clear and present danger to party control
of politics. Johnson's war was not unique.
p274
It is no coincidence that between 1938 and the 1960s-the period
coterminous with a successfully aggressive American foreign policy-free
politics in America was more dead, political hope more thoroughly
blasted, the prospects for reform more dim than in any other equal
span of time in our history. During the period of the Cold War,
the party oligarchs were able to savage troublesome politicians
for being "soft on Communism" and do this so readily
that party ranks were virtually stripped down to their essential
core of bosses and henchmen. During those years of political degradation,
the "liberal" Democratic party could, with impunity,
make a Senator from the Texas ruling clique the leader of its
Senate contingent and let a handful of men in the House Rules
Committee control the legislative destinies of the nation. During
that same period of political degradation, the isolationist wing
of the Republican hierarchy could, with equal impunity underwrite
the Truman Doctrine of aggressive internationalism by accusing
the Democrats of being insufficiently anti-Communist. During that
same period false issues flourished and real issues were readily
falsified. Public medical care for the aged, the simple and logical
extension of the Social Security Act, could be proposed by Tammany-liberals
as a visionary reform and successfully attacked by Republicans
as "creeping socialism," as if Republicans had not criticized
Roosevelt in 1934 for failing to submit a social security measure.
It was a period so politically degraded that when the Congressional
oligarchs wanted to get rid of an honest regulatory commissioner
they quoted his early writings against trusts as proof of Communist
leanings, as if the Sherman Act had been the work of fellow travelers.
It was a period so politically degraded that a Democratic nominee
for the Presidency could be described as a fresh political voice
for demanding an end to a nonexistent missile gap and for criticizing
a Republican administration's inability to fight "brush-fire
wars." During the Cold War period virtually all public issues
were foreign issues, which is to say, no issues at all. While
every kind of inequity flourished at home, the oligarchs could
rivet people's attention to the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. During
the Cold War period a citizen would have sought in vain from one
coast to the other for five eminent elected officials who spoke
with an independent voice. During that period the oligarchs' control
over American politics was more complete than it had ever been
before, more so even than the 1920s. The Cold War has served the
party oligarchs well.
The Principle of Waste
p277
The most obvious consequence of the Cold War is America's present-day
military establishment with its three million fighting men, its
more than one million civilian employees, its twenty-two thousand
prime arms contractors and its more than two million dependent
defense workers. If the oligarchs' determination to prosecute
an aggressive foreign policy predates by half a century America's
contemporary military machine, the political advantages of the
military machine have greatly strengthened their determination.
It has enabled the party oligarchs to solve what for them is a
grave political problem-how to waste scores of billions of dollars
a year.
The problem arises from a fundamental
condition created by monopoly capitalism. That system, as Baran
and Sweezy and others have demonstrated, cannot generate demand
for its products and outlets for investment large enough to absorb
the surplus wealth it generates. Since surplus wealth which can
be neither invested nor consumed will not be produced, "the
normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy is stagnation."
Without the government's help, "monopoly capitalism,"
according to Baran and Sweezy, "would sink deeper and deeper
into a bog of chronic depression." If the country is to avoid
a depression and another collapse of the monopoly system, the
government must stimulate demand by means of enormous annual public
expenditures.
That the government must pour billions
of dollars into the economy each year does not, to conventional
political understanding, seem like much of a problem. It would
seem to be an unparalleled opportunity for improving the general
lot of the citizenry. Virtually every city, town and hamlet in
America is in dire need of public revenues. 'What could be more
immediately beneficial to all Americans than the allocation of
a much-needed $30 billion a year out of Federal revenues to restore,
improve and revive local communities? Almost everybody suffers
to some degree from polluted air, polluted waterways and a despoiled
and deteriorating environment. To accomplish real and sweeping
environmental improvement (not just keeping things from getting
worse) would cost scores of billions of dollars. What could be
simpler than spending every cent required, since the money must
be spent anyway? Poverty in America could be virtually eradicated
with the stroke of a legislative pen and would, in addition, open
vast new markets for the merchandise of the monopoly industries.
Again, since the money must be spent, what could be more reasonable
than eliminating poverty once and for all?
Yet the oligarchs' efforts in these and
other areas have been notoriously grudging. Only the most intense
public pressure gets anything done at all.
... On the other hand, under no public
pressure whatever, the same oligarchs lavish almost half the annual
Federal revenues on military and space programs without the slightest
regard for economy, or even, as will be seen, for their own estimate
of the needs of national defense. Given a golden opportunity to
spend large sums of money on programs beneficial to all, the party
oligarchs demonstrably prefer to spend them as wastefully as possible
...
p281
The usurped power of the party oligarchs, perpetually threatened
by political liberty, can only be maintained through a ceaseless
effort to discourage the exercise of that liberty. The party oligarchs
must perpetually try to demonstrate anew that politics is futile,
that politicians are powerless, that public hope is public folly,
that whatever is must be, that whatever happens is inevitable,
that every citizen's real enemy is the citizen next door. That
is why the opportunity to spend billions of dollars yearly on
improvements of benefit to all is not an opportunity but a peril
to the oligarchs. The existence of a profligate military establishment
constitutes, therefore, a compelling confirmation of all that
I have been trying to demonstrate about power in the American
Republic today.
To carry out by government action some
large, generous and clearcut improvement in the life of the citizenry
would undo all that the oligarchs strive perpetually to achieve:
it would reveal the power of politicians, the reach of political
action and the noninevitability of many conditions of life. To
the exact degree that it was beneficial, it would encourage citizens
to act in their own behalf, and their very gratitude to the party
which enacted the reforms would endanger the leaders of that party.
It would encourage activists, civic improvers and ambitious men
of all kinds to enter every political club of that party in every
town and district and neighborhood, threatening organization control
of local party politics. Neither party organization can afford
to be a genuine party of reform. This is the reason ... why both
American parties have a "reform" wing and an "Obstructionist"
wing: the one to promise, the other to betray. There is no need
to conjure up obstructive special interests to explain the oligarchs'
refusal to spend public money beneficially.
... party bosses in most states have persistently
starved local communities of revenues and forced them to make
shift with the property tax, the alleged power of small-town rentiers
notwithstanding. The less revenue a local government has, the
less it can do and the more moribund and controllable local politics
becomes. In addition, the more financially hard-pressed a local
government is, the easier it becomes for the state party bosses
to strip it of local powers it can no longer finance, a process
of state centralization which the oligarchs have been carrying
out in most states for generations. Strengthening and augmenting
local self-government is the very opposite of what the party oligarchs
try to accomplish.
There is a similar reason for the oligarchs'
reluctance to spend money eradicating poverty, a reluctance dramatically
underscored when Johnson averted a promised war against poverty
with a real war in Asia. (Lest anyone attribute this to popular
sentiment, it is worth recalling that Johnson won a great election
victory after promising the former and was driven out of office
for undertaking the latter.) Since the eradication of poverty,
by opening new markets, would be far more equitably beneficial
to the giant corporations than the arbitrary, lopsided awarding
of military contracts, the only interest served by the persistence
of poverty is that of the party oligarchs: the poor are relatively
easy to control. Mired in daily economic anxieties, distracted
from public concerns, grateful for mean favors, inured to insult,
to futility, to the arrogance of bureaucrats, they have served
as the bulwark of machine politics for many generation here is
a backhanded recognition of this truth in the views of certain
left-wing elitists, Tammany-socialists, so to speak-when they
argue that local self-government or local control of schools is
a "middle-class value" of no concern to the poor as
such. 'What they mean is that the poor are less likely to defend,
or exercise, their liberty than citizens free of the treadmill
of penury. This is exactly true, and that is what makes them an
asset to oligarchy. America is perhaps unique in this regard,
that material plenty and economic security do not render the American
citizenry politically docile. It makes them more active and more
demanding. It is no coincidence that the movement for civil rights,
the growing demand for general reforms, for participation in government,
for greater "control over one's life" swelled to a climax
during a period of unparalleled economic boom.
The oligarchs' interest in maintaining
poverty (or poverty ameliorated by welfare bureaucracies which
also keep the poor under control) puts them in something of a
dilemma. They must maintain a fairly prosperous level of demand
for the sake of the economy while simultaneously maintaining pockets
of poverty, a task which requires the capacity to distribute wealth
in such a way that the hard-core poor remain poor. For accomplishing
this ... the annual military budget is uniquely well adapted.
The political role of the military budget
is therefore an obvious one. Given the huge sums involved, it
is the only practical way to waste public money which the oligarchs
would otherwise have to send in ways perilous to their power.
Obviously, the Cold War has been the oligarchs indispensable pretext
for doing this. The military needs created by the Cold War cannot
account for the size of the annual military budget, because even
by the oligarchs' own estimate of the Soviet military menace,
most of the money spent on national defense is wasted money. What
governs the annual military budget is no recognizable military
purpose, not even an ominously aggressive one, no definable estimate
of the needs of national security, not even one based on the alleged
Kremlin drive to dominate the world. What chiefly governs the
military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in
a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle
for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle
for the refuse of a city.
p289
The final demonstration of the principle of waste, however, is
still fact that the military budget perpetually increases. The
reason for that increase has little to do with expanding needs
of national defense, for those needs have hardly grown. The number
of missiles needed to destroy the Soviet Union has not increased
appreciably since the 1950s; the threat of a Soviet attack on
Western Europe has not increased over the years; the defensiveness
of China has been demonstrated under fairly intense provocation.
The reason the oligarchs keep increasing the military budget as
far as they can has nothing to with military needs. The truth
is, as America's productive capacity increases, the amount of
public expenditure needed to maintain effective consumer demand
also increases. As a result the oligarchs must constantly contrive
new ways to increase military spending. This is the reason Johnson
added $4.1 billion to his last non-Vietnam military budget to
counterbalance a $3.5 billion cut in his Vietnam budget. This
is the reason the oligarchs give the Pentagon hundreds of millions
of dollars each year in research funds to concoct and keep moving
down the budgetary pipeline new and more outlandishly costly weapons.
This is why, in any given year, the annual military budget contains
seed money for space shuttles, new ABM systems, advanced bombers
and the like, thereby providing the oligarchs with a budgetary
backlog they can later expand at will.
... Averting a grave threat to party power
is, I believe, the oligarchs' chief reason for creating and sustaining
the bloated military establishment. It is not, however, the only
one. The annual military budget also brings the oligarchs certain
positive political advantages. By dispensing billions of dollars
each year to twenty-two thousand arms contractors, the party oligarchs
have created a network of economic dependents more sharply subservient,
more directly subject to their caprice, than the ordinary monopoly
corporations are-the categories of arms contractors and monopolists,
of course, overlap. In this sense, the military budget is simply
an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking
the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly,
of enormous outlays of capital supplied by Pentagon to arms contractors
...
What is more, the military pork barrel
spreads special privilege far beyond the confines of the arms
contractors; it directly creates at least two million industrial
jobs, every holder of which is all too dependent for his well-being
on the well-being of the party oligarchs and the success of their
corrupt policies. By virtue of the military budget, a large number
of ordinary citizens have been given a direct stake in corrupt
power.
p292
The fact that the party oligarchs can distribute military boodle
wherever and whenever they choose
allows them, for example, to pour military boodle-contracts and
jobs-into those states where party power appears to be in danger
and to do so whenever such danger arises. During the Kennedy-Johnson
years, Texas went from eleventh to second among states in the
amount of defense outlays it receives. This is usually attributed
to the influence of Johnson, but this is only partly true, if
true at all. The more important reason is that in the early 1960s,
as I said, the ruling clique of the Texas Democratic party was
in serious danger of losing control of the party By pouring billions
of dollars of defense boodle and boodle jobs into Texas, the party
oligarchs were trying to help the Texas gang retain their power,
a matter of great importance since the outbreak of free politics
in Texas would have political repercussions throughout the South.
A similar political reason explains why
California far surpasses other states in the amount of arms money
it receives-almost three times as much as New York State. California's
sunny climate has nothing to do with its attractiveness. The fact
is, California, alone among the large states, has been chronically
difficult for party bosses to control. It is still far from being
a tight oligarchic state, but in the mid-1950s California politics
was much more open than it is today. The $10 billion in defense
outlays which California now receives every year has certainly
played a part in this.
Lastly, the fact that the party oligarchs
can dispense and withdraw military boodle at will has also helped
them strengthen their control over Congress, for it is the bastions
of the oligarchs, the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees,
which control the military pork barrel in Congress. A compliant
Congressman troubled by unemployment in his district can have
it promptly diminished by the suitable bestowal of a military
contract; a Congressman tempted to take an independent line can
have unemployment inflicted on his constituents if he steps too
far out of line. Through their control of the military boodle,
the oligarchs can make a hack Congressman appear a genuine power
in the House and an unruly Congressman appear inept and useless
in the eyes of his constituents. Party politics is a system of
political rewards and punishments controlled as far as possible
by the party leaders, and the annual military budget, through
its unparalleled size, its geographical extent and its flexibility,
has added greatly to the tools at the oligarchs' disposal.
... The party oligarchs have every reason
of their own to feed the military-industrial complex and no reason
of their own to stop. That is why the American Republic today
is saddled with the most profligate military establishment in
history, twenty-five years after the American people, following
a victorious war, were looking forward to peace and disarmament.
Without the fiction and fabrications of the oligarchs' Cold War
policies, without its perpetual crises and alarms, such a military
establishment would have been politically impossible, indeed virtually
unthinkable. The oligarchs' interest in sustaining the Cold War
is, therefore, a very great one. It combines all the profound
and perennial advantages of an aggressive entangling foreign policy
with an unequaled opportunity to use the wealth of the citizenry
against them. The Cold War has become, understandably enough,
one of the chief pillars of oligarchic power.
The Restoration of Self-Government
p295
The near-monopoly of American politics by two collusive party
syndicates is not one problem among many. It is the first and
fundamental one as well as the wellspring of most of the others.
As long as the present oligarchy rules, we will not have a restrained
and peaceable foreign policy; we will not see racism languish
and mutual respect grow among the citizenry. We will not see special
interests curbed, economic dependence diminished nor special privilege
stripped from the overprivileged. We will not see bureaucratic
caprice curtailed nor our schools made fit for the children of
free men. We will not see the public wealth beneficially spent.
The government will continue to turn into a Circumlocution Office
when called upon to remedy a common grievance or correct a glaring
abuse.
The party oligarchs do not act as they
do out of a random and gratuitous malevolence. The party oligarchs
are neither malevolent nor benevolent; they are self-interested.
'What they have done they have done, first, to usurp the citizens'
power and then to secure that usurpation. To expect them to carry
out voluntarily, in a fit of political altruism, reforms that
endanger their power is a sad and fatal delusion. To expect reformers
acceptable to the bosses to do so is a vain and forlorn hope,
hope in the service of the enemies of hope and so one more falsehood
in the system of public lies that now darken our public life.
For the free men of this Republic there
is only one way to make a new beginning. We must, in Lincoln's
words, "meet and overthrow the present ruling dynasty"
We the citizens of the Republic must find the means to break up
party control of politics and strip the usurpers of their corrupt
and corrupting power. This cannot be done, however, by a national
mass movement, because no mass movement ever overthrew an oligarchy
without setting up another in its place. 'What perpetually and
radically imperils the ruling oligarchy in this Republic is the
political liberty of the citizen and its vigilant exercise, a
liberty which the oligarchs can impair but not destroy, the exercise
of which they can discourage but not forbid. The only certain
means to overthrow the present ruling dynasty without setting
up another is to augment political liberty itself; to increase
the capacity and willingness of the citizens to act in their own
behalf, to make it easier for free men to enter public life, to
bring issues that interest them into the public arena, to bring
forward for elective office independent men who have won their
trust, to make it easier for independent men to win their trust
and so by a rigorous exercise of liberty to hold elected officials
accountable.
p314
By teaching every person how to judge for himself what will secure
or endanger his freedom, republican education would try to ensure,
as far as it is humanly possible, that the citizens themselves
become the firm and enlightened partisans of the Republic, which
is nothing more or less than the constitution of their liberty.
It means a citizenry which tries to apply to every important public
measure and policy the fundamental republican standard does it
augment or abridge the exercise of liberty? Does it weaken or
strengthen corrupt, irresponsible power? It means a citizenry
which understands that the struggle to maintain a genuine republic
is itself a never-ending struggle, that equal liberty, in Lincoln's
words, "must be constantly labored for, and even though never
perfectly attained, constantly approximated."
Since people cannot even begin to understand
the requirements of their liberty without a grasp of political
reality, the heart of republican education, the very core and
spine of its curriculum, must be the study of political history,
that vast and wonderful stage of public action, which reveals
what is most noble and most vile in men, which discloses the scope
of man's power over forces and processes, which displays ambition
under all its shapes, which tells stories of the death of kings
and of republics. Such stories, in truth, would be far more interesting
to the young, just as they would be far more instructive, than
the prancing of Dick and Jane, the "evolution of transportation"
and the whole farrago of "social studies" which is now
obliterating the very idea of political history from the minds
of the young in accordance with the oligarchs' fundamental pedagogical
commandment: thou shalt not be taught what free men must know.
I have no doubt that America's educators will prove as ingenious
and imaginative in forging the curriculum of liberty as they have
been in framing the curriculum of oligarchy. What they need is
a change of employers.
p318
Beneath the feet of every citizen lies the foundations of the
Republic. Beneath the party oligarchy lies nothing but unexposed
mendacity and successful fraud. It is this which accounts for
the peculiar condition of American politics, at once so puzzling
and so infuriating to foreign observers; the existence of a public
life polluted with lies yet virtually untainted by public cynicism.
The true voice of political corruption has not yet been heard
in this Republic-the voice of the usurper who openly claims that
his might is his right, that power belongs to whoever can grasp
it. The party oligarchs make self-government a sham, but they
dare not call self-government a sham. They wield great power but
they claim no right to such power; they are forced to deny its
very existence.
Hypocrisy, it is said, is the respect
vice pays to virtue, and so it is with the incredible hypocrisy
of public life in America. It is impossible for party politicians
to be candid about anything, for what they would soon have to
admit in candor is that they stand opposed to self-government
and the constitution of liberty. That they dare not do. That corrupted
the Republic is not. The authority of a free constitution lived
under for nearly two centuries has a weight and force in public
life which is beyond human ken to measure and beyond the oligarchs'
power to defy. It is the force and weight of that authority-and
Americans recognize no other authority-which stands behind the
cause of liberty and of every citizen who elects to fight for
it. The party oligarchs wield innumerable weapons but one mighty
weapon is denied them in any struggle to oppose the augmentation
of liberty. They cannot tell American citizens that they are unfit
for self-rule. By an apparent paradox it is the adherents of liberty
in this Republic who are free to speak and who speak with authority.
It is the ruling dynasty which is gagged.
p320
Doubtless cynics will say that Americans are not interested in
governing themselves and do not want the cares of liberty. The
party oligarchs, however, are wiser than the cynics. That is why
they are never cynical in public. It is not because Americans
are indifferent to liberty that the oligarchs keep "friends
to republican government" from holding public office. It
is not because self-government is the rarefied ideal of the enlightened
few that the oligarchs try to keep republican issues out of the
public arena. They know that liberty and self-government form
a standard to which Americans will repair. That is what the ruling
dynasty knows and fears, and their fears, as always, are identical
with our hopes.
Indispensible
Enemies
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